That was my lament as I read, with open eyes and a suffering heart, the spare and chilling stories in "Say You're One of Them," Uwem Akpan's important literary debut out of Africa (by way of the master-of-fine-arts program at the University of Michigan, where the Nigerian author, who is not only a serious writer but a Jesuit priest, perfected his craft and earned a degree). Juxtaposed against the clarity and revelation in Akpan's prose -- as translucent a style as I've read in a long while -- we find subjects that nearly render the mind helpless and throw the heart into a hopeless erratic rhythm out of fear, out of pity, out of the shame of being only a few degrees of separation removed from these monstrous modern circumstances.

The warring Japanese once reputedly called the America they attacked at Pearl Harbor "a sleeping giant." Africa, poor Africa, as we discover in these terrifying stories, is a bleeding giant.

The first story, "An Ex-mas Feast," sets quite high the bar for pain and suffering in childhood, as a young boy tells how his eldest sister, having turned 12, has taken to the streets of Nairobi to earn money for his schooling -- and the effects created in the family because of her earnings. The second story (novella-length really, at more than 130 pages), "Fattening for Gabon," opens with an extraordinary line: "Selling your child or nephew could be more difficult than selling other kids." If, in the overly long follow-through, this story with the amazing setup seems to drag a bit, it may be the flaw of the first-book writer who wants to cram everything into a story rather than leave things out.

The equally long tale "Luxurious Hearses" earns every page of its length. Allegorical in feel but frighteningly realistic in its up-to-date politics of religion, region and tribe, the narrative begins in a bus station in central Nigeria where a large bus has paused in its journey to the south of the country from the rioting northern provinces.

"In times of peace," we're told, "these buses made cross-country travel easy. The hundreds of police checkpoints never stopped the buses to search them or to harass their drivers for money because the bus companies made enough to settle with the national police command monthly."

Akpan searches his bus. The interior becomes a little stage on which we see the various intricacies of contemporary Nigerian politics, ethnicity and religion played out, in the persons of various seemingly larger-than-life characters. From a fugitive Muslim teenager, to a traditional tribal chief, to an army officer and a number of Nigerian citizens, the passengers parade before us even before the bus gets into gear. The Muslim boy, who has lost a hand to a Sharia law judgment about petty theft, has tried to disguise himself as a Christian to make his way south to seek refuge with his mother's southern family. His quest becomes the central action of this unfolding tragedy (in which the actors have little control over their destinies) about what the author calls an "Africa in distress." The conclusion is all the more stunning because of its certainty from the beginning of the story.

Yet the ultimate pathos comes in the short story that concludes the volume, "My Parents' Bedroom," told by a frightened girl from Rwanda. Just before going into hiding, the girl's beautiful Tutsi mother ("high cheekbones, a narrow nose, a sweet mouth, slim fingers, big eyes, and a lean frame," is how the daughter describes her) says to her, " 'When they ask you, . . . say you're one of them, OK?' " The mother discovers that no hiding place is good enough when the genocide begins in earnest.

The reader discovers that no hiding place is good enough with these stories battering at your mind and heart.

"Modern time, mon! Modern time."

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Alan Cheuse is a book commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered," a writing teacher at George Mason University and the author, most recently, of "The Fires," a book of two novellas.

Uwem Akpan will be at the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair, June 7 and 8. www.printersrowbookfair.org